Jupiter's moons and Saturn

Jupiter's moons and Saturn

April 28, 2017

Jupiter is still the star of the night and we should enjoy this good period to take nice picture of it. Saturn is also present on the second part of the night, but it is still low on the horizon.
I also managed to set up the telescope in order that it compensate earth rotation. Thanks to this, it is much easier to play around with the parameters of the camera, since I don't have to worry anymore to move the telescope once I found the object. I also did some improvement of my setup, because of the glue that I used to fixed the tube on the piece of wood I destroyed the camera (fortunately raspberry pi cameras are cheap). To correct this problem, I did a small hole in the wood to fixe the camera on the other side. Unfortunately, doing this reduce the place on the camera side, and the raspberry pi A+ was too big to be fixed. But, in the end of December 2016, the raspberry pi fundation releazsed a new model, the rasperry pi zero W. This model is perfect for this kind of application since it is much smaller than the other models and comes with integrated wifi.

Enough talking, here are the pictures!

Fig 1. Jupiter, the star of the night.

Playing with the iso of the camera one can reveal the Jupiter's moons.

Fig 2. Three of the Jupiter's moon clearly visible.

The next picture is quite weird. we can see a kind of circular object. At the first, I though that it was a dwarf galaxie, but I think it is a too optimistic conclusion. The probability to find this kind of objects by going randomly (as I did since I did not manage to find any interesting objects) is almost null. I think that the form that we see is Jupiter. By playing on the camera parameters one can reveal very different things and some of my Jupiter pictures are really different from the ones shown here (you can download all the photo of the session at the end of the page as always). What is very intriging is that we can see some stars below the objects?? Interesting ...

Fig 3. I believe a weird picture of Jupiter ...

And finally, the first picture of Saturn :). The quality is far to be the best because Saturn is still low on the horizon, and not yet at the opposition. I hope to get much better pictures in one month or two.

Fig 4. My first photo of Saturn!! The rings are clearly visible.

You can download all the pictures of the session with this link, The original pictures.